Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  Another one of Rochester’s men-at-arms glanced sideways at her, and she gave him a reassuring grin. “Boss talking to her voices. That’s all.”

  The young man-at-arms had a white face, under his visor, but he gave her a sharp, efficient nod. “Yes, boss. Boss, what have they got for us out there? What should we watch out for?”

  Fuck only knows! About ten thousand Visigoths, I should think…

  “Those recurved bows. They don’t look like much, but they’re as fast as a longbow, even if they don’t have the penetrating power. So. Bevors up, visors down.”

  “Yes, boss!”

  “Now they feel safer,” Angelotti observed in an undertone. “It isn’t weapons, madonna. It’s sheer numbers.”

  “I know.”

  The thread of disquiet in her belly turned into a distinct twinge.

  “That’s the problem with armour,” she said musingly. “Strapped in. You can’t take a shit in a hurry when you need to…”

  – Ah. Dysentery: the warrior’s excuse.

  “Godfrey!” Ash spluttered, amused and appalled.

  – Child, are you forgetting? I’ve followed you around military camps for eight years. I minister to the baggage train. I know who does the laundry, after a battle. You can’t hide anything from the washerwomen. Courage is brown.

  “For a priest, Godfrey, you’re a deeply disgusting man!”

  – If I were a man still, I would be at your side.

  It jolted her, not out of the warm feeling of comradeship, but into a keener grief for him. She said, “I will come for you. First: this.” She raised her voice. “Okay, let’s do it!”

  As the units of armed men passed into the tunnel-like gate below one of Dijon’s watch towers, Thomas Rochester’s sergeant bent down and muttered in her ear, over the noise, “What does he say?”

  “What does who say?”

  The Englishman looked uncomfortable. “Him. Your voice. Saint Godfrey. Do we have God’s grace in this?”

  “Yes,” Ash replied, automatically and with complete conviction, while her mind murmured Saint Godfrey! in something between appalled amusement and awe. I suppose it was inevitable…

  “Troop movements, Visigoth camp, central north section?”

  – No movement reported.

  And that means fuck-all, Ash thought grimly, hearing her boots echo off the raw masonry walls of the sally-port; hearing, in her soul, an incursion of ancient, inhuman muttering. Right now, she’s not talking to the Stone Golem either.

  The Lion grooms brought the horses forward; Ash’s new mount a pale gelding some yellow-tinged colour between chestnut and bay, points barely dark enough to be distinguished; Orgueil returned to Anselm. She mounted up. Angelotti reined his own scrawny white-socked chestnut in beside her, still favouring his wounded arm. Ash glimpsed the bulk of linen bandages under the straps of his vambrace and his arming doublet.

  Ahead, Burgundian soldiers yanked iron bars down from the gates as quickly as possible, passing her and her men through and out with indecent haste. The gates slammed behind them. She looked up, as they came into the open air, but her helmet and bevor prevented her turning her head enough to see the top of the wall, and the Burgundian archers and hackbutters she hoped would be up there.

  The high saddle kept her extremely upright, legs extended almost straight. She shifted her weight, moving forward in the grey light, anxious to traverse the uncertain sloping ground before the walls. One of the men-at-arms on foot beside her grunted, and efficiently kicked a caltrop out of the way.

  A quick glance to the east showed her Dijon’s city walls emerging from white mist, and, at their foot, a moat three-quarters choked with faggots of wood thrown down by assaulting troops. Beyond the churned earth, trenches and ranks of mantlets covered the ground between her and the Visigoth main camp.

  “Okay: move out…”

  Once out of the gateway, Rochester’s sergeant raised Ash’s personal banner.

  “ASH!”

  The shout came from the walls above: a deep roar of voices, that broke into “Hero of Carthage!” and “Demoiselle-Captain!”, and ended in a ragged cheer, extremely loud in the early morning. She wheeled the gelding, leaning back in the saddle to look up.

  Men chanted: “Scar-face! Scar-face!”

  The battlements were lined with men. Every embrasure thick with them; men climbing on to merlons, adolescent youths hanging from the wooden brattices. She lifted her hand, the gauntlet dull with freezing cold dew. The cheerful noise went up again; raucous, bold, and disrespectful; the same noise that men make before – unwillingly trusting – they commit themselves to the line-fight.

  “Kick the bitch’s ass!” a woman’s contralto voice yelled.

  “There you are, madonna,” Antonio Angelotti, at Ash’s side, said. “We have a doctor’s advice!”

  Ash waved up at Floria del Guiz, tiny face almost invisible on the high walls. There was a cluster of lion livery jackets with her; they made up a sizeable proportion of the crowd.

  “You can’t keep anything a secret overnight.” Ash turned the gelding. “Just as well, really. We may need someone to haul our asses out of this fire.”

  Ahead, east of the river, lateral banks of white mist clung to the Visigoth barrack-tents and turf huts. Droplets of water illuminated the guy-ropes, and the tethers of the horse lines, in the weak rising sun. A freezing wind flapped one tent, its canvas side bellying out.

  A long, black line of Visigoth men-at-arms stood along the palisade. A thin shout went up, in the distance.

  There’s bold, and there’s stupid, Ash reflected. This is stupid. There’s no way we’re going to be allowed back out of there.

  She tapped one long rowel-spur back, just touching the gelding’s flank. It plodded forward. Not a fighting horse.

  No, Ash thought, squinting against the first rays of the sun. Not stupid. What did I say to Roberto? Don’t lose sight of the mission objective. I’m not here to fight the Visigoth army.

  Faintly, in her shared soul, the clamour of the Wild Machines begins to grow again. Nothing intelligible to a human mind.

  Does she hear it too?

  I’m not even here to get out of their camp alive, if there’s a chance to take the Faris out.

  What do I know about sisters, anyway?

  “Doesn’t look good, boss,” Thomas Rochester said quietly.

  “You have my orders. If we’re attacked, and the Faris is there, kill her. We can worry about getting us out after she’s down. If we’re attacked, and the Faris isn’t present, we bang out. Make for the north-west gate, behind us. Sound the retreat loud and clear, and pray for some Burgundian help. Got it?”

  She spared a glance for the Englishman, his stubbled face visible between visor and bevor; his expression alert. Lines of strain showed he understood that they might be dead before the end of the morning. He was, nonetheless, unexpectedly cheerful.

  “Got it, boss.”

  “But if it looks like sheer suicide for no result – we don’t attack: we wait.”

  Antonio Angelotti turned in his saddle, pointing into the early morning mist. “Here they come.”

  The long clarion call of a truce rang out. White standards went up, five hundred yards away.

  “Let’s go,” Ash said.

  Rochester and the escort formed up and moved forward.

  Ash became aware of the way they closed around her, horse and foot; not protectively, but prideful, as if to show their own efficiency as guards. Men who would let no fear show.

  She rocked gently to the pace of the gelding, riding on, in among the tents, staring down from the saddle at Visigoth soldiers; not a barefoot woman, now, prisoned in Carthage; nor a lone woman walking through their camp; but a captain who is surrounded by well-armed men, who has – for good or ill the responsibility of ordering them to fight and live or die.

  The Faris, illuminated by the lemon-yellow low light of dawn, stepped out on to the beaten earth. She wore armour but no helm
. From fifty yards, there is no reading her expression.

  I could kill her now. If I could get to her.

  Companies of the XIV Utica lined the way through the camp; men in mail and white robes, dank in the dawn, the light flashing from the leaf-shaped points of their spears. Somewhere between two and two and a half thousand men, she guessed. All eyes on her and her men.

  “God damn you,” Ash said quietly. “Fuck Carthage!”

  A voice in her head, that was both the machina rei militaris and Godfrey Maximillian, said, – Before you take vengeance, go and dig your own grave.

  A smile moved her lips. It did not reach the taut, controlled fury that she would not let show. “Yes… I was never sure how you used to mean that one.”

  -It means no vengeance is worth such anger, such hatred. You may lose your own life in the attempt.

  She feels the rocking of her hips, as she rides; lays one hand on the fauld of her armour, over her belly. A chill, controlled shudder goes through her. A memory of the smell of blood, in a cold cell like this same cold morning, passes through her mind. She is suddenly aware of the razor-sharp edge of her sword in its scabbard, of the balanced weight of metal at her thigh.

  “I’ll give you another version of your proverb,” she murmured. “It means, the only way that you can be sure to achieve vengeance is to count yourself already dead. Because there’s no defence against an attacker who isn’t afraid of dying. ‘Before you take vengeance, go and dig your own grave’.”

  – Be very sure that you are right, child.

  “Oh, I’m sure of nothing. That’s why I have to talk to this woman.”

  Angelotti, quietly, said, “Have you forgiven them the Lord Fernando’s child? Carracci, Dickon; those who died in House Leofric, that’s war – but have you forgiven them your child?”

  “It didn’t have a soul. Isobel used to lose two out of every three, when I was living with her on the wagons. Every year, regular as a clock.” Ash squinted into the light, growing as the mist lifted. “I wonder if Fernando’s dead as well?”

  “Who is to know?”

  “What I won’t forgive her is, she should have thought this through years ago. She’s known for years that she’s hearing a machine. Sweet Green Christ! She’s just followed it blindly, she’s never thought, why this war?”

  Angelotti smiled with enigmatic calm. “Madonna, when you untied me from a gun-carriage outside Milano and told me, ‘Join my company because I hear the Lion telling me to win battles,’ I might have said much the same thing. Did you ever ask the Lion, why any particular war?”

  “I never asked the Lion which battles I should fight,” Ash growled. “I just asked Him how to win them once we were on the field. Getting me the job in the first place isn’t His business!”

  Angelotti’s pale throat showed, under his helm, where he had left off his bevor, and now threw his head back and laughed. Several of the Visigoths they passed stared curiously. Rochester’s escort had the expressions of men thinking he’s a gunner.

  “Madonna Ash, you are the best woman of any in the world!” Angelotti sobered; his eyes still bright with affection. “And the most dangerous. Thank God you are our commander. I shudder to think how it would have been, otherwise.”

  “Well, you’d still be ass-upwards on a gun-carriage, for one thing, and the world would have been spared one more mad gun-captain…”

  “I will see who I may speak with among the Visigoth gunners, during this truce. Meantime, madonna—” Angelotti’s gold curls, clamped down by his sallet, were dulled by the dank morning. He lifted his steel-covered arm, pointing: “There, madonna. See? That is where she expects you.”

  In a rattle of scabbards on armour, they rode forward. Ash saw the Visigoth woman turn away from her commanders and walk out to a little awning, set up in a space in the middle of the camp. A table, two ornate chairs, and a plain canvas awning: set in the middle of thirty yards of bare earth. No room for anything to be concealed, and anything done there would be public.

  Public, but not overheard, she reflected, judging the distance to the surrounding Visigoth qa’ids, ’arifs, nazirs, and troops.

  The ’arif Alderic, as she expected, stepped forward from among the units of soldiers.

  “Please you to join the Captain-General,” he said, formally.

  Ash dismounted, slinging her reins to Rochester’s page. She kept one hand automatically on the hilt of her sword, palm flat against the cold metal of the cross.

  “I accept the truce,” she replied, equally formally. Surveying thirty yards of unoccupied, trodden earth, with the table in the middle of it, she thought What a target for the archers.

  “Your weapons, jund Ash.”

  Regretfully, she unbuckled her sword-belt, handing him sword, scabbard and dagger together in a tangle of leather straps. With a nod of acknowledgement, she went forward.

  Under the laminated plates of her backplate, under the pinked silk arming doublet, sweat dampened the skin between her shoulder-blades as she walked out across the open space.

  The Faris, seated at the small table under the awning, stood up as Ash came within ten yards of her, holding her hands out from her sides. Her hands were bare, and empty. The white robes over her coat of plates and mail hauberk might easily conceal a dagger. Ash contented herself with leaving her bevor up, and tilting her sallet for a clearer view of the Visigoth woman; leaving steel plate and riveted mail to cope with any theoretical stiletto.

  “I would have had wine set out for us,” the Faris said, as soon as Ash came within speaking distance, “but I thought you would not drink it.”

  “Damn right.” Ash stopped, for a moment, resting her gauntleted palms on the back of the carved white oaken chair. Through the linen, she felt the shapes of the ornamental carved pomegranates. She looked down at the Faris, seating herself again on the opposite chair. The remarkable face – familiar to her only from scratched, polished metal mirrors, and the dark, glassy pools of river backwaters – still shocked her: a churning sensation somewhere in her gut.

  “But in that case,” Ash added, “we get to sit here and freeze our asses off, and be thirsty.”

  She managed a pragmatic, confident grin; walking round and hitching up back tasset-plate and fauld to sit down on the ornate chair. The seated Visigoth woman signalled without looking behind her. After a few seconds, a child-slave approached with a wine jug.

  The bitter wind that now shifted the morning mist blew filaments of silver hair across the Faris’s face. Her cheeks were white, the flesh drawn; and faint purple shadows lay under her eyes. Hunger? Ash thought. No. More than that.

  “You were in the forefront of the defence of the walls, yesterday,” the Faris said abruptly. “My men tell me.”

  Ash sprung the bevor pin, pushing the laminated plate down, and reached for the silver wine goblet offered by the slave. The wine smelled, to her chilled nose, merely like wine. She clamped her mouth over the edge of the goblet, tilted it, from long practice appearing to drink deeply; put it down, and wiped the wine from her lips with the gauntleted heel of her hand. No liquid entered her mouth.

  “You won’t take this place by assault.” She looked from the flat area, towards Dijon. From the ground, the grey and white walls and towers appeared satisfactorily solid and appallingly tall. She noted the interview was being conducted well away from the remaining saps, creeping ever closer under the earth. “Hell. It really does look nasty from out here. Glad I’m not on the outside! Golem siege-towers or not…”

  The Faris, ignoring her, persisted: “You were fighting!”

  The Visigoth woman’s tone told her much. Ash kept her expression calm, friendly, and confident; and listened to the note of extreme strain.

  “Of course I was fighting.”

  “But you were silent! You asked the Stone Golem nothing! I know you asked for nothing, no tactics; I asked it!”

  The lemon-yellow of the rising sun paled to white. With the mist dispersed, Ash risked a quick
glance around the nearer part of the Visigoth camp. Deep mud ruts, some tents ragged; fewer horses than she had expected. Behind the troops drawn up in ranks – obviously the best, for show purposes – she could see many men sprawled on the freezing wet earth in front of some of the turf huts. At this distance, hard to see if they were wounded or whole; but possibly whole, and just short of tents in winter. Faces in the ranks showed hunger; were thin – but not yet gaunt. A whole cluster of stone self-moving siege-machines appeared to be parked towards the Suzon bridge, either in waiting, or broken down.

  The Faris burst out: “How can you risk fighting, without the voice of the machine?”

  “Oh, I get it…” The armour would not let her lean back, but Ash carefully spread her arms on to the arms of the chair, giving the impression of relaxed expansiveness. “Let me tell you something, Faris.”

  While her gaze avidly totted up the number of spears and bows, the numbers of barrel-laden wagons in the background, Ash said aloud, “I could already fight when I was five. They had us in training, the kids on the wagons. I could already kill a man with a stone from a sling. By the time I was ten, I could use a half-pike. The women on the baggage train weren’t there for ornament. Big Isobel taught me how to use a light crossbow.”

  Ash flicked her gaze back to the Visigoth woman. The Faris stared, opening her mouth to interrupt.

  “No. You asked me a question. This is the answer. I killed two men when I was eight. They’d raped me. I was in sword-training with the other pages by the time I was nine, with somebody’s broken, re-ground blade. I wasn’t strong enough, the camp dog could have bowled me over – but it was still training, you understand?”

  Silent, her dark eyes fixed on Ash, the Visigoth woman nodded.

  “They kept knocking me down, and I kept getting up. I was ten or eleven, and a woman, before the Lion ever spoke to me. The Stone Golem,” Ash corrected herself. A dry wind blew across the camp. Prickles of cold touched the little amount of skin she had exposed: snow-crystals stinging her scarred cheeks. “In the year or so then before I could get back to our company, I made my mind up that I would never come to rely on anything – not a Saint, not Our Lord, not the Lion: nothing and nobody. So I taught myself to fight with and without my voices.”